ough he had seen a deal of the world, he did not know much about the
conversation of women.

The struggle was brief. He began to wear plainer clothes--an Oxford
tweed coat and a flannel shirt--to talk about fame as an empty word, and
to tell his father that he was superior to all stupid conventions.

His father sent him to Australia. Then the grown-up trouble of his life
began.

He passed through the world now with eyes open for the privations of the
poor, and he saw everything in a new light. Unconsciously he was doing in
another way what his mother had done when she flew to religion from
stifled passion. He had been brought up as a sort of imperialist
democrat, but now he bettered his father's instructions. England did not
want more Parliaments, she wanted more apostles. It was not by giving
votes to a nation, but by strengthening the soul of a nation, that it
became great and free. The man for the hour was not he who revolved
schemes for making himself famous, but he who was ready to renounce
everything, and if he was great was willing to become little, and if he
was rich to become poor. There was room for an apostle--for a thousand
apostles--who, being dead to the world's glory, its money or its calls,
were prepared to do all in Christ's spirit, and to believe that in the
renunciation, which was the "secret" of Jesus, lay the only salvation
remaining for the world.

He tramped through the slums of Melbourne and Sydney, and afterward
through the slums of London, returned to the Isle of Man a Christian
Socialist, and announced to his father his intention of going into the
Church.

The old man did not fume and fly out. He staggered back to his room like
a bullock to its pen after it has had its death-blow in the shambles. In
the midst of his dusty old bureau, with its labelled packets full of
cuttings, he realized that twenty years of his life had been wasted. A
son was a separate being, of a different growth, and a father was only
the seed at the root that must decay and die.

Then he made some show of resistance.

"But with your talents, boy, surely you are not going to throw away your
chances of a great name?"

"I care nothing for a great name, father," said John. "I shall win a
greater victory than any that Parliament can give me."

"But, my boy, my dear boy! one must either be the camel or the
camel-driver; and then society----"

"I hate society, and society would hate me. It is only for the sake of
t